20 February, 2018

Filly Funtasia in 2019

It’s been a while since we had anything to report. In fact, there’s been no official communication of note about Filly Funtasia since BRB disavowed the show in late 2016 and no official communication of note about Filly in general since Dracco signed a deal with Goliath in spring 2017. Accordingly, we haven't posted any articles at all on Funtasia Daily for about half a year as there hasn't been much to report on. Considering all of this, it would not be too unreasonable to think Filly Funtasia has simply been abandoned and forgotten by everyone.

But it has not. The founders of Dracco, brothers Henrik and Jacob Andersen, have conducted an interview with Danish business website Finans.dk where they reveal, among other things, that Filly Funtasia has a new projected release date - 2019.

The information is divided into two rather long articles.
Both of them are in Danish and one of them is locked behind a paywall,
so this article will contain a summary of the information in both of
them along with background information for context.
The main focus of the articles are the brothers’ attempt to restore a company hit by a protracted legal battle and a disruption to their distribution network. The articles focus on the break of the contract between Dracco and Simba Dickie, and this seems to be the main underlying cause for the problems the franchise has faced over the last few years.

Let’s back up a bit. As we elaborated on in our article about the companies involved in Filly Funtasia, Dracco (originally a Danish company, now based in Hong Kong) was the creator of the Filly IP and Simba Dickie (a German toy manufacturer) was the company that manufactured and distributed the toys from the initial launch of the Filly toyline in 2006 all the way until some point in the winter between 2013 and 2014 when the contract was broken.

This had two effects. First, this impacted the distribution network for Filly and the toyline disappeared almost completely from some regions. According to the article, the sales figures for Filly has dropped sharply from its high point in 2013, and the toyline no longer has the dominant position among girls’ toys on the German market that it once enjoyed.

Second, it has led to a series of protracted legal battles in the courts of Hong Kong. Two initial charges were filed in 2014
- the first concerning alleged damages from the breech of the licensing contract and the second concerning the supply contract. According to Dracco, Simba owes Dracco unpaid licensing fees for allegedly continuing to sell their stock of Filly products after the termination of the licensing agreement. This has led to a series of legal verdicts that have gone back and forth between the two parties, with the latest verdict I could find being from late 2016. According to the interview, this legal mess has had a negative impact on Dracco along with the reduced toy sales.

The result of these two problems is that Dracco is currently losing money. Both brothers have their own holding company, and they are joint owners of Dracco Group Holding ApS. Altogether, these three holding companies have declared a loss of 279 million DKK after taxes last year.

They both claim to have injected several hundred million DKK into Dracco Group Holding but do not wish to disclose what their total assets are. The stated value of Dracco is 886 million DKK, and the value is stated to have been written down by 20% after the recent troubles. It is also claimed that 100 million Filly toys have been sold, about 13-14 million issues of the Filly Magazine and one million CDs.

In a statement, an auditor claims that it’s not possible to properly verify the value of Dracco due to the conflict with Simba and the fact that Dracco subsidiaries have recently been transferred to holding companies which use different financial years.

The articles also talk about the future plans of Dracco, which mainly revolve around the Filly brand. They cite a strong presence at European toy fairs and their new partner Goliath as indicative of a coming recovery for Filly, but notes that they do not expect the brand to truly become profiled until early 2019.

Because that’s when they plan to launch a cartoon.

The article does not mention Filly Funtasia by name, instead simply referring to it as a cartoon about Filly that consists of 26 half-hour long episodes, but I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that this cartoon is indeed Filly Funtasia.

It is claimed that the cartoon in question is currently under production, and that a deal with a Chinese production company is in place about both the current cartoon as well as unspecified future productions. (BRB and its subsidiaries are no longer involved in Filly in any capacity, as previously reported.) The partner is said to have a strategic cooperation with one of China’s largest TV stations which is hoped will lead to a broadcasting opportunity in China.

The Chinese company in question is not named, but while it could theoretically just be Black Dragon, it does not really seem to me like they are a company with that kind of clout, and the article seems to imply that this deal is a somewhat new thing.

Right after mentioning this, the article goes on to mention in a very short sentence that Dracco also has a partnership with a company in the US. While the placement of this sentence in the article seems to imply an US-based production or broadcasting company that will be involved in the TV show, it could simply refer to Dracco’s US toy distributor, WhatNot Toys.

Finally, the Dracco brothers claim to have already sold their cartoon to “a few countries” without specifying which countries these are or if any of their old broadcasting deals from the BRB era are still in play.

And that's everything of relevance in the articles. While Dracco's specific plans for Filly Funtasia are still very much unclear - at least we now know that they still have plans for it.